Cta Defends Maintenance Of Buses, Trains After Crash

October 02, 1994|By Gary Washburn, Tribune Transportation Writer.

Financial pressures have forced the Chicago Transit Authority to make millions of dollars in spending cuts this year, but senior agency officials insist the CTA has taken no shortcuts on vehicle maintenance.

Their comments came after a fatal bus crash Thursday that killed one person and seriously injured several others.

A cost-cutting program submitted a few months ago to the Regional Transportation Authority, the CTA's parent agency, contained a plan to defer $3.3 million in "non-emergency maintenance work."

But the spending reductions apply only to buildings and not trains or buses, said Constance Mortell, a top aide to CTA President Robert Belcaster.

"It was such things as replacing roofs, the annual painting of garages, resealing floors and resealing driveways," Mortell said. "It had zero to do with rolling stock, security or safety measures."

Nevertheless, the accident has raised questions about the adequacy of CTA maintenance.

The bus' driver, Ana Ponce, told police that both steering and brakes failed just before her coach rammed into an underpass pillar on Addison Street near Kenton Avenue.

Ponce, who had to be cut out of the wreckage, was treated at Cook County Hospital and released Friday. A passenger, Rose Mikrut, was killed in the crash.

The CTA has refused to disclose its bus inspection and maintenance schedules and procedures pending completion of an investigation, but officials promised full disclosure when the probe is completed.

"Right now we don't have anything," said Isiah Thomas, president of Local 241 of the Amalgamated Transit Union, which represents CTA bus drivers. "I don't think the CTA has anything. Everybody right now is trying to investigate."

But Thomas said he knows of no maintenance problems at the transit authority.

"To the best of my knowledge, I don't think the CTA is an advocate of cutting corners," he said.

Meanwhile, a police accident expert said the simultaneous failure of steering and brakes would be an extremely rare event, and he said that mechanical failure of any kind is the least common cause of vehicular accidents.

"I've been doing this for 26 years, and in the thousands and thousands of accidents I have investigated, I could probably count on one hand where it's been a mechanical failure," said Officer Thomas McKenna of the police major accident investigations unit.

Countering early reports from the accident scene, he said no witnesses reported hearing Ponce shout that she had lost her brakes before the crash.

One person who came up to the scene said she was yelling, "No brakes, no brakes," after the accident, he said.

A passenger on the bus told police there was no sensation of braking before impact, and another rider said the driver "was going too fast for conditions and lost control," McKenna said.

Ponce was hired by the CTA in May 1975 and is believed to have a good record, though officials have declined to comment.

The transit authority has hired Norman J. Barry, a Chicago lawyer, to lead a task force to determine the cause of the crash.

The team will "research all the facts and circumstances" surrounding the accident, Mortell said. Included will be CTA maintenance practices and schedules and anything "that would have had an influence" on the accident, she said.

Contributing to the task force will be Packer Engineering, a Naperville-based firm that on Friday began examining the wreckage of the bus. Experts are expected to check the vehicle's mechanical systems, including those involving braking and steering.